As of 11 am Central time on Saturday, there are 29 hours to go on Peter Gordon’s Kickstarter venture for Fireball Newsweekly Crosswords. A mere $5 will get you all 20 weekly puzzles for July to December! Peter’s close to the goal but still needs another $990 pledged to make the project a go. Think of all the disappointed backers who will get no puzzles if the $10,000 fund-raising goal isn’t met.

Ned White’s New York Times crossword

NY Times crossword solution, 6 15 13, no 0615

I have some doubts about this puzzle. Or douts. Two nearby answers with OUT in them, one a total oddball answer I’ve never, ever encountered before? 28a: LOUD OUTS, [They result when solidly hit baseballs are caught]? Huh. And then there’s 38a: HEAD OUT, [Go], which would have been fine if I hadn’t just spent time trying to tease out 28a’s answer.

I’m feeling unfocused in my approach to this puzzle, so bear with me as we march randomly through some stuff. For 13d: [Herpetologist's supply], I wanted ANTIVENIN or ANTIVENOM, but it turned out to be ANTISERUM. That looked vaguely fishy to me but it pans out. (The linked antiserum is no good for boomslang bites, but you’re all set for mambas and cobras.)

I think the accent mark in 11d: [Fêmur, por exemplo] is pointing us towards the Portuguese OSSO rather than the Italian osso.

I love the BAOBAB TREE (9a. [With 25-Across, it has a huge trunk]). My favorite tree-I-learned-about-as-a-kid-that-doesn’t-grow-around-here.

4d. [Water board] clues AQUAPLANE. No idea what this thing is. Looking it up … it’s a board you ride on in the water, being pulled by a speedboat. Huh.

My vote for Most Likely to Mire Solvers in Tough Crossings: 62a. [Site of a 1944 British Army defeat], ARNHEM. The H is in BAHN, 53d. [German way], and the M is in ULTIMO, 45d. [Last month].

I reckon pannonica will be along later to shed some light on 9d. [Saxophone great Sidney] BECHET.

Things I learned from crosswords back in the day: ESSENE, ELEA, REO, EL AL, ALER (ugh—this one is newer than the others), UTE as shorthand for sport utility vehicle, ATLI the Hun king, and the ELAND. Eleareoelalalereland is not a place I’d like to vacation.

A [Magician's profession?] could be TRICKS TRADE. “Tricks of the trade” are not widely known ways of doing something in a particular industry, like how car salespeople come up with a price of a new car.

I had a hard time figuring out the theme device at first, half expecting a revealer at the end to clue me in. But finally the somewhat awkwardness of the resulting phrases led me to how they were developed. (I wonder if in a remake of The Sixth Sense, might Cole Sear, when seeing dead heiresses walking around, say “I see WILL PEOPLE”?) Luckily, the puzzle is redeemed by some quality fill like STOP THAT!, BLAST OFF and home to some great iced tea, the state of ARIZONA. I am a bit curious about cluing ECO as [Start to babble?]–is “ecobabble” a thing or is this referring to an ecosystem’s “babbling” brook? My FAVE entry was SET SMILE for [Candidate's expression while working a room], which I can totally envision. My UNFAVE has got to be the latest installment in playground retorts (here as [Juvenile rebuttal]) or ARE SO. These type of entries ARE SO ready to be retired, don’t you think?

Brad Wilber’s Los Angeles Times crossword—Andy’s review

LAT Puzzle 06.15.13 by Brad Wilber

Happy U.S. Open weekend, and happy early Father’s Day! (Oh, and, uh, happy birthday to me!) A return to normalcy this week, as Brad Wilber once again takes the reins of the LAT Saturday puzzle.

I was shocked to discover that this grid had only 70 words. It looks (and solves) like a higher word count puzzle. I think my surprise came mostly from the fact that the grid is novel: it’s not like most of the LATs, which have 10 or 11 stacks in the corners, nor is it like the Saturday Newsday standards, which have four 7×7 blocks in each corner. This one has just four 10-letter marquee entries, stacked in pairs, and they’re all beauties:

21a, LIQUID SMOKE [Barbecue sauce additive]. Liquid smoke is created through a process called destructive distillation, which basically sounds like mad science.

46a, FLOOR MODELS [They're often discounted]. As in price, rather than as in ideas. I misread this at first as [They're often discontinued], but fortunately enough that clue also leads to the same answer.

51a, RAN THE GAMUT [Skipped nothing]. I expected the more crossword-common RAN FROM A TO Z, and was pleasantly surprised when it wasn’t.

13d, GAZELLE [Epitome of grace].With the G and final E in place, I had to keep reminding myself that giraffes are not particularly well known for their grace.

The epitome of grace, ladies and gentlemen.

6d, ARBITRARY [Capricious]. For most law-ish people out there, this was probably a gimme. Arbitrary and capricious is a well known standard of review, and they’re forever linked in my mind.

22d, QUILP ["The Old Curiosity Shop" villain].There’s the Dickens I was looking for earlier.

23d, MR. SLATE [Prehistoric toon boss].Who else? Fun fact*: When I went back to my completed grid to blog this entry, I briefly wondered who Mrs. Late was. [*Fact may not be flattering.]

Mrs. Late is her mom.

It’s rare that so much of the good stuff in a themeless is in the down entries, but it makes sense with this grid, given that almost everything over six letters long is there. I was a big fan of both of the 7×3 stacks: ALFREDO/PILATES/ADONAIS and MOLOKAI/I LIKE IT/GAZELLE. The trio in the SE of TREACLE, AIRHEAD, and CRISPY evokes an interesting combination of textures. I had very few hiccups while solving: the big one was that Bennett CERF, [Random House co-founder], was new to me. I’m more familiar with Vint Cerf, one of the “founders of the Internet.” Another possible sticking point is LIDO [Lagoon of Venice resort]. Other than that, nothing too crazy: HANA Mandlikova is pretty standard crosswordese, the suffixes OLA and ERN are fine by me, and DEI was clued in pretty much the easiest way possible, [Agnus ___].

3.5 stars from me. Until next week!

Brad Wilber’s Newsday crossword, “Saturday Stumper”

Newsday crossword solution, 6 15 13 “Saturday Stumper” by Brad Wilber

Feh. I got through the puzzle, though the majority of it felt like a struggle/slog. Tons of tough clues, but not many that made me go “Ah!” with pleased appreciation. Much more in the way of scowls at the misleads rather than grudging acknowledgment of having been outwitted.

One error, if you ask me: 38d. [Trial-conducting org.] clues FDA. Does the FDA actually conduct clinical trials, or does it just review the trials conducted by drug/equipment/etc. manufacturers? I think it’s the latter.

16a. [Where liberties are typically taken], ASHORE. On shore leave. “Liberty” can mean leave granted to a sailor. Who knew?

19a. [Prelude to a new course], UEY. A U-turn before changing course? Meh.

23a. [Dressing aid in a shop], ADZ. Wood shop. No salad, no clothes.

31a. [Successful stumpers], ELECTEES. ELECTEE is a word I see in crosswords far more often than in political writing. Meh.

33a. [Big __], OLD. Huh?? This can stand alone? Is it “big old” or “Big Old”?

52a. [Practice advocate], AMA. Medical practice.

57a. [Something pulled by farmers], ROOT CROP. Pulled up/out of the ground, not pulled along the surface.

61a. [Without allies], SOLELY. This doesn’t feel like a reasonable equivalent to me.

2d. [Name derived from a Gaelic goddess], EIRE. I did not know that. I also did not know the word had two syllables.

8d. [Quaint, necessarily], PASSE. Can’t something new be old-fashioned in style without actually being passé? For example, a lacy wedding gown might be quaint, but who would call it passé?

10d. [Setting for a Puccini opera], THE WILD WEST. For real? Had no idea.

11d. [Showed supreme satisfaction], ROARED. I think this only works for a pleased crowd. Can one pleased person roar approval?

13d. [Knotty problem], TESTER. Checked a dictionary that does not include this sense of the word TESTER. Any help?

36d. [Baguette unit], ONE CARAT. Baguette-cut jewels. The unit of measure would be CARAT, though. ONE CARAT assigns a specific value to the number of units.

42d. ['70s Polaroid camera], PRONTO. No recollection of this.

The fill is certainly solid, 4 stars, but the overall unpleasantness of the cluing makes me drop the puzzle to 3 stars. That’s one thing that distinguishes the tougher Saturday NYTs, Fireballs, BEQ Themeless Mondays, and Klahn CrosSynergy “Sunday Challenges”—the most difficult clues make you admire their cleverness or surprise. The tougher Newsday “Stumpers” merely try to stymie the solver rather than showing off the cluer’s wit.

22 Responses to Saturday, June 15, 2013

My father was a high school baseball coach. One year the team got a catcher’s mitt that was both too small and so hard and padded that it could not be broken in. He gave it to me and my best friend and we played pitcher/catcher with it for years. While we were probably throwing at about 55 mph, the loud pop that the glove made when the ball was caught made us feel like we were Sandy Koufax. I don’t think I have thought about that in more than 50 years until today’s clue. I first had the logical LINEOUTS and then the nostalgic LOUDPOPS.

Interesting puzzle. I like learning new names (BECHET), and unusual terms are also kosher (ANTISERUM). What I don’t care for is invented terms that aren’t in the vernacular. LOUD OUTS is not a phrase. Baseball announcers don’t use it. Coaches don’t use it. Players don’t use it.
Seriously, don’t make stuff up in your puzzles that might have a few Google hits or sounds plausible, but fits the grid. Please. It’s my little pet peeve. See also “I’M NOT HERE” to a lesser extent, as clued. Totally valid English, but strange in context as a cohesive phrase.
Otherwise, had fun solving this. Lots of clever clues and unexpected twists. That’s all for now, have a great weekend!

I don’t think I’ve heard the phrase “loud out” since the mid ’70s. (But, then again, I can hear the phrase in Tim McCarver’s voice, so maybe I heard it in the mid-to-late-’80s when I was watching a ton of Mets games on channel 9.)

Was also thrown by the use of OUT in two clues so close together.
ARNHEM is a place I’ve been through many times. I lived in the Netherlands for 5 years and it was one of the major landmarks on highway signs.

Actually, Sidney BECHET held me up for a while, because even though he was a saxophonist, his most important early recordings were as a clarinetist. Also had BANYAN | TREE rather than BAOBAB, which is wrong two ways: instead of realizing that banyans are strangler figs, I was—perhaps influenced by the “plane” in AQUAPLANE—thinking they were the trees that have the huge planar bases.

For Sidney Bechet

That note you hold, narrowing and rising, shakes
Like New Orleans reflected on the water,
And in all ears appropriate falsehood wakes,

Building for some a legendary Quarter
Of balconies, flower-baskets and quadrilles,
Everyone making love and going shares –

Three cheers for the Team! I worked out most of the NYT last night, but got hung up till morning on the NE where I wanted a DEODAR before finally seeing BAOBAB… Did anyone else go there? (Also tried ANTIVENOM before ANTISERUM.) That was quite a challenge, overall.

I liked the puzzle better than the consensus. One dispositive factor for me is always the absence of the categories of clues I so vociferously dislike. Here we have only one Simpson reference. (There’s a “buzz” cola????)

I have heard the phrase “just a loud out” used by announcers, though the expression “loud foul” is more common, in my experience. I too started with “line out”.

I’m not sure in what sense the estate “restores” the heir. “Restores” suggests it’s something the heir previously had. Restores him to his rightful place in the universe? (All’s right with the world?). But I did like the parallelism between heir restoration and hair removal.

Bahn, as in Autobahn. The Battle of Arnhem was a major WW II event, and a well-known Dutch town, but a crushing and unexpected defeat for the British and the allies, deterring an allied push into the German lines in the Netherlands.

Is “Saturday” an SNL *segment*? (Haven’t watched it since the Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner (the late), John Belushi (ditto) days.)

Sidney Bechet’s rendition of ‘Summertime’ is not to be missed.

On the smooth side of the Saturday curve for me; no real snags or slowdowns.

Lovely, knotty NYT, I thought. BECHET was the big, honking gimme for me, not least because I spent all day Friday writing a chapter about him for my New Orleans book. He was by all reports a mean SOB, but he wrote one of the most soulful autobiographies I’ve ever read, and of course his playing was stunning. Bruce, I’ve posted the YouTube clip of his rendition of Summertime on my Facebook wall several times. One of those recordings you can’t possibly hear too many times.

Let me add my thanks to the Team. I really enjoy the diverse points of view, personalities and styles; each and every one of you adds something distinctive. Now, if we could only find a good placekicker. . .

Amy – Re NYT 6/15, 11 Down: Just a quick note- It’s not just the accent mark that indicates Portuguese in 11 down. Had they indicated the Italian “osso”, it would have been clued as “femur, per esempio”.